


if we weren't such good friends i'd wish you were dead

by rillrill



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Absent Parents, Abusive Relationships, M/M, Mild Blood, POV Alternating, Roman Catholicism, Slurs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-04
Updated: 2015-03-04
Packaged: 2018-03-16 06:45:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3478352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rillrill/pseuds/rillrill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The difference between them is that Dennis builds walls to keep things out. To keep people out. Mac’s walls are there to hold things in. And either way, they’re crumbling, and it’s going to be a fucking mess when they finally fall to pieces.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if we weren't such good friends i'd wish you were dead

**Author's Note:**

> You realize the one person in the world who loves you  
>              isn’t the one you thought it would be,  
> and you don’t trust him to love you  
>              in a way that you would enjoy.
> 
> — Richard Siken

_The difference between them, as Dennis sees it, is that Dennis builds walls to keep things out. To keep people out. Mac’s walls are there to hold things in. And either way, they’re crumbling, and it’s going to be a fucking mess when they finally fall to pieces._

 

*

Mac is ten and his dad isn’t coming home. He’s not sure whether that means indefinitely, not-now-not-ever, or maybe it’s just in the short term, like as in he won’t be home for Christmas (so he and his mom will have to go door-to-door on their own this year). He’s never sure what it means. Sometimes his dad is around, but even when he’s not, his presence is there, a father-sized hole in the family photos that never get developed. Or taken. It doesn’t matter, because his dad is doing his best. That’s what Mac tells himself when another letter to the prison goes unanswered, or another birthday passes without notice or celebration. It’s okay, because his dad didn’t do anything wrong, and someday he’s going to make it all right.

 

*

 

_Sometimes Dennis thinks about space, about meteors and asteroids. Impact events. Heavy objects, lucky enough to escape gravitational pull. Hurtling through space alone, an ice-cold frozen rock in an empty void, sometimes lucky enough to slam into something bigger, through fate or consequence or both. They break apart on impact, meteors, but they leave a mark. The destruction is what makes it real. The destruction makes it mean something._

_If Dennis is a meteor, he’ll leave as many craters in as many people as he can. He can count the scars he’s given the four people closest to him, and sometimes he tallies them up, rereads the notes in their files for proof when he needs to remember who he is and what he’s done. It’s oddly reassuring, he thinks, when his sister chokes and gags on her own words when he looks at her with the right shade of anger in his eyes. It’s Mac, though, who absorbs most of his impact. Mac is the one who takes the bullet more often than not, and only fights back to a certain point, until he’s no longer afraid to be caught enjoying it. It makes Dennis angry. It makes him hit harder, fight more viciously. A small part of him suspects that Mac knows exactly what he’s doing._

 

*

 

Mac is fifteen and he’s not an altar boy, not even close, but he goes to church when he remembers and it feels good, like he has a purpose. He takes the blood and the body and says all the prayers, gets the words right. He’s not good at memorizing stuff for school or whatever, but this, he can do.

He goes to confession once a week. Sometimes he confesses for other people. Tells on them, technically. Confesses on them, really, and it’s for their own good because he’s taking care of their souls, something they’re too lazy to do themselves. Whoever came up with “Ronnie the Rat” had no idea what they were talking about, so fuck you, Tim Murphy. 

Dealing is a good side gig, because there’s never enough money in the house. Dealing buys all the shit he’d feel too guilty to bug his mom about, cigarettes and beer and illegal fireworks and whatever. More drugs. More stuff to feel bad about, to maybe leave out of confession, because he still wants the priest to like him. He and Charlie get high on glue and watch shitty TV, cartoons they’re probably way too old for, but even though they worked out how to tap into the neighbor’s cable box to watch garbled HBO, neither of them makes good on switching the channel to maybe catch a flash of boob. 

“God loves everyone, except for sinners,” he says out loud. Charlie isn’t listening. It just sounds right.

 

*

 

_Repercussions are real, and nothing proves it better than a row of bloody scratches, a mottled bruise, the fading fingerprints on Dennis’s own throat. He leaves marks to remind Mac that he can’t pray away his actions forever. No matter that the power at the apartment sometimes flickers off because budgeting is a tricky balancing act and Dennis avoids paying the bill for a couple days to dodge an overdraft fee. Never mind that there are probably a couple warrants out there that he doesn’t know about, or even care to know about. Never mind that he hasn’t paid Maureen’s alimony in months. It’s not the same. He’s not running from his own skewed self-image. He knows who he is. He is not the issue. He is fine._

 

*

Mac is seventeen and his best friend is Dennis Reynolds. He’s still best friends with Charlie, too, but in the space of little more than a year, Dennis has taken priority, moved into his life and rearranged the furniture as he sees fit, making himself at home. Not that Mac minds. It’s not like Dennis raises his social status at all – this weird, skinny kid who wears makeup and gets called faggot every other day and sometimes goes on long tangents about being a golden god – but he’s good company and he’s got a rich dad, and he’s always down to get into trouble and doesn’t use Mac for his drug connections too much. So it’s okay. 

They take a career aptitude test in school that year. Dennis scores exceptionally high on it. “You can do essentially anything you put your mind to,” the guidance counselor tells him as Mac waits outside the door, sitting in the hall. Mac has no such luck. The counselor tells him to look into technical programs, trade schools. 

Dennis gets into Penn. No one ever entertains the idea that college might be an option for Mac, not even himself.

A little part of him always considered the priesthood, even though the priest at the local parish doesn’t like him so much anymore ever since he found out about all the drugs. But then Matthew Mara announces that he’s going to take the cloth, and of course, of all people it would be Rickety-fucking-Cricket yanking that future out from underneath him, and besides, seminary costs money, of which he has almost none. When he finds out about this, he skips school for the rest of the day, ducks out behind the back parking lot and smokes listlessly, leaning against Dennis’s car like he’s in some James Dean movie or something. Or, like, The Outsiders, which they watched in English class when they had a sub and Mac could see Dennis mouthing all of Rob Lowe’s lines. 

Dennis skips seventh period like he usually does. It’s late enough in senior year that nobody really cares, anyway. He shows up to the parking lot, keys swinging from his hand. When he spots Mac leaning on the hood of his car, he smiles slightly, like he’s happy to see him there.

“You wanna go fuck with Rickety Cricket?” Mac asks by way of greeting.

Dennis shrugs. “When do I not?”

He visits his dad a couple times. It never goes well. It’s not that he’s angry. It’s just that it’s safer not to get his hopes up anymore.

 

*

 

_“Hey, Dennis,” Mac says, wiping down the bar with a damp rag the color of dishwater. Dennis groans inwardly, and then outwardly as well. He hates this tone. He hates the way Mac tries to live without consequence. Repercussions are real, he wants to scream, shaking him by the shoulders. You can’t swim in the pond without causing ripples. Be a man, for Christ’s sake. But Mac isn’t a man, Mac is a ghost of a man running from a fate he can’t avoid, a shadow a hundred times taller than him, and Dennis gets the feeling that he could scream until he lost his voice and it still wouldn’t do any good._

_“I’m done,” Dennis mutters. He yanks on his jacket and heads for the door, not even stopping to hear the rest of whatever Mac’s on about. “I’m so done.”_

 

*

 

Mac is thirty-five and his dad is out of prison and he dares to think, for a moment, that things might be different. That he might actually get to do things over, have the family he deserves. He throws himself into it. 

It doesn’t work out, of course, because it never does. “I don’t know what you expected,” Dennis mutters after avoiding Mac in the apartment for a few hours.

“What the fuck do you mean by that?” Mac demands, jumping up from the couch, knocking over his beer. He expects Dennis to shrink back, but instead he just squares his jaw, looking ready for a fight.

“All this,” Dennis says, waving his hand. “It’s not like your life’s a piece of shit or anything. You did okay without his help.”

Mac folds his arms. He knows Dennis has a point, but it’s not one he wants to acknowledge. “Your dad is –”

“Really? You’re going to bring my parents into this?” Dennis is running his hands through his hair, rubbing the back of his neck like he does when he gets agitated. “I’m not – don’t try to make this a shitty-parents competition, because you know I’ll win, asshole, my mom was a psycho pillhead who slept around and Frank is – Frank – he doesn’t count as a real dad and you know it.”

“At least he's around,” Mac says weakly. 

Dennis shakes his head. “Sometimes I wish he wasn’t.”

After that, Dennis leaves the apartment for a few hours and only checks in once, comes home smelling like sex and cigarette smoke and pine-scented air freshener, and they mutually agree not to talk about Mac’s dad again. 

 

*

 

_There’s a spray of red marks on Mac’s back, a series of half-moon bites, jagged circles surrounding perfect, unblemished skin. There are red marks already starting to fade and a bruise that won’t. As Dennis looks at them, he finds the permanence grounding. This is something that neither of them can deny or drink away._

_Maybe someday, they won’t think about this at all. Maybe someday, they’ll be happier. But that doesn’t seem likely._

 

*

 

Mac is forty and his dad doesn’t love him. Mac is forty and technically homeless and can’t even pretend to be attracted to women anymore. Mac is forty and he’s got three scratches still healing over on his face from the last time Dennis lost his patience with him. 

Mac is forty and he’s sleeping on a pile of blankets on Dee’s floor, and Dennis is sleeping in a hammock two feet above him. He wakes up one night to the sound of Dennis thrashing around above him, like a spider caught in his own web. Seconds later, there’s a gasp and a garbled _Shit_ and Dennis lands on the ground beside him, with a heavy thump that would knock the breath out of anyone. 

Mac is barely awake and barely present, but he notices that Dennis, instead of standing up and getting back in the hammock, simply groans groggily and shifts closer to Mac, pulling at one of the blankets draped over him. Which is bullshit – if Dennis wants to sleep next to him, he’s not going to argue, but he better not steal his fucking blankets. Mac groans back and yanks at the blanket, hard, before Dennis yanks back.

It’s two in the morning, probably closer to three, and they’re half-asleep on Dee’s floor, playing tug-of-war over a ratty blue afghan from her linen closet, and for some reason this strikes Mac as unspeakably hilarious. He starts laughing in spite of himself, and then Dennis is laughing too, half-spreading the blanket over both of them and shifting closer until Mac thinks he can hear Dennis’s pulse beat against the floor. Maybe it’s his own. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

Mac settles back in and lets himself drift back off, and he wonders how Dennis got to be like this, so warm and comfortable in his vulnerable moments and so brittle and sharp and dangerous in others. It couldn’t have always been this way. It wasn’t like this in the beginning. He’s heard that if you put a frog in a pot of cool water and then put the pot on a burner and slowly turn up the heat, the damn thing will sit there and boil to death because it can’t sense the water heating up around it. 

So it’s like the old math problem from middle school: if the water’s getting hotter at a rate of twelve degrees a year, and it takes him ten and a half years to boil to death, when should the frog jump out? Or when is it too late? And what if he’s comfortable pretending that everything is fine?

And Dennis shifts closer on their bed of blankets and exhales a soft breath against his clavicle, and Mac feels the tension leave his body, and he feels like his choice has been made for him.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Jenny Owen Youngs' "Fuck Was I." Which is a very Macdennis song, by the way.
> 
> The Richard Siken quote in the intro notes is from the poem "A Primer for the Small Weird Loves."


End file.
